Community-Centered

To continue the discussion of Anderson's chapter and relate it to our ISWO discussions... Anderson refers to How People Learn by Bransford, Brown and Cocking and discusses their argument that effective learning is community-centered, knowledge-centered, learner-centered and assessment-centered.

Unit 1 of ISWO took up the topic of community and community-building in online courses and participants raised a number of issues around the importance of lack of importance of community. Some pointed to ways that they build community in f2f classes and are looking for ways to do that online. Others pointed out that some students aren't really interested in developing community with their online peers – they just want to get the content and get on with it. Still others drew attention to readings and their own experience and discussed the difference between cohort and community. Several people offered their ideas of ways to build community in online environments.

Anderson describes a number of people who promote community, including Wenger (members of a learning community both support an challenge each other, leading to effective and relevant knowledge construction) and Wilson (participants share a sense of belonging, trust, expectation of learning, and commitment to participate in and contribute to the community.) But he also points to writing of others who discuss the difficulty of achieving community online... “I short, it may be more challenging than we think to create and sustain these [virtual] communities... linked to lack of placedness and synchronicity in time and place, the mere absence of body language, and the development of social presence.”

He agrees that many online students may no be looking for community, “Contrary to popular belief, the major motivation for enrolment in distance education is not physical access per se, but the temporal freedom that allows students to move through the course of studies at a time and pace of their own choice. Participation in a community of learners almost inevitably places constraints upon this independence... The demands of a learning-centered context at times may force us to modify the most proscriptive participation in communities of learning, even though we have evidence that such participation will likely advance knowledge creation and attention.”

It seems that Anderson might agree with ISWO participants in that it would help to get to know learner needs, expectations and commitment as well as discuss/negotiate roles and responsibilities early in the course. This might allow us to provide some flexibility for learners and at the same time make our own thinking clear to them.

Chapters from Theory and Practice of Online Learning

Tuesday, I had a long day of flying and spending time in airports on my way to Indiana. (I'm here for Mother's Day and for my mother's 82nd birthday.) Before I left I printed a couple of chapters from Terry Anderson's and Fathi Elloumi's book, Theory and Practice of Online Learning. I read the first chapter, by Mohamed Ally, several months ago and enjoyed it as a good look at educational theory and tying it to various e-learning practices/strategies. While I did not enjoy chapters 2 and 4 as much, they both casued me to think about online learning as it relates to several current projects - ISWO being one of them.

Terry's chapter (2), Towards a Theory of Online Learning, made a case for the need for theory and two points that he draws from BrentWilson made a lot of sense to me as I go charging ahead, steeped in the demands of practice: 1) Theories can help us to invest our time and resources most effectively; 2) Theories force us to look beyond day-to-day contingincies and ensure that our knowledge and practice of online learning is robust, considered and ever expanding.

I also appreciated his argument that 'learner-centered' would be more accurately labeled 'learning-centered.' And as he discusses this Anderson posits that 'The online learning environment is ... a unique culteral context" and quotes Benedikt who says that cyberspace "has a geography, a nature, and a rule of human law." I'd love to sit down with some colleagues, maybe over a beer, and try to describe the geography, nature and rule of human law of the Internet.

Another point that might relate to our Work/Life Balance discussion is Anderson's observation that a danger of assessment-centered learning is a potential to increase workloads for online instructors.

He also discusses and points to others who would support many of the current posts in the ISWO Building Community forum. I think I'll leave that for another post.